Political Scene: Murdoch’s Spouting Dam

How does Rupert Murdoch feel today? “I’m imagining he feels, just based on the daily breaking stories, like he’s watching a dam with holes spouting out, and he doesn’t have enough fingers to close it,” Ken Auletta says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. The phone-hacking scandal has already forced News Corp. to shutter the News of the World and withdraw its bid for British Sky Broadcasting, and will likely gain further steam when Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks appear before Parliament next week. Auletta, who is joined on the podcast by John Cassidy and Lauren Collins, calls the developments a threat to the Murdoch family’s “whole notion of political invincibility.”

The problem that Murdoch has is that he’s had all this power, and suddenly people who were kissing his ring don’t have to kiss his ring anymore. And they feel, in fact, they don’t want to be seen with him. And I think that’s a very damaging thing.

“It’s an astonishing turnaround in all sorts of ways,” Cassidy agrees, for a man to whom British politicians flocked for support to now be the object of such public and universal derision. “Nobody over there is standing up for him…. It’s open season on Rupert.”

But by Murdoch’s telling, Auletta says, that pariah status is nothing new.

He went to Oxford, yet he calls himself an outsider. He’s a billionaire, yet he calls himself an outsider. He’s a maker of Presidents and Prime Ministers, yet he calls himself an outsider. It’s one of the curious things about him that he’s fuelled by this sense that he is an outcast, he is an outsider, he’s not a member of the establishment … but, God, you can’t be more inside than Rupert Murdoch in British, or Australian, or, today, in American politics.

Collins, on the phone from England, argues that there’s something to Murdoch’s outsider claims.

There is this animosity directed at Murdoch for being this interloping commonwealth provincial who has had the establishment in such a firm choke-hold for so many years. A lot of people have been using the line comparing him to Berlusconi, but saying at least Berlusconi is an Italian citizen. I’ve heard that one over and over again.

I would argue the fish stinks from the head, that [Murdoch] set the culture of News Corp., and the culture was, in the newspaper division, you get the story, you be first with that story, you get in any way. I don’t know an editor alive in this world who, if you came in with the kind of stories they were coming in with at News of the World, wouldn’t have asked their reporter, “How’d you get that story? Who’d you talk to? Who’s your source?” No way. And Murdoch should have been asking that question, and certainly the people who ran that division, from Rebekah Brooks on up, should have been asking that question.